Dear readers,As the weather gets colder and the semester nears its inevitable end, I can’t help but imagine the bright lights and harmonious carols, that Christmas ambience signifying the end of a long semester and the start of a long deserved break. I can’t wait to just enjoy life for what it is instead of worrying about exams and assignments.

I opened my eyes to darkness. The only light in the room was from the dimly lit computer screen in front of me. As I leaned forward to look around the room, my lower back screamed in pain; I winced as I checked the damage. The muscles were tense and swollen.

More than 30 years ago, my father set his foot on American soil for the first time in his life. Young and ambitious, he was dispatched there, along with my mother and sister. They quickly grew accustomed to the culture there; they were a happy little family.

Dear readers,As consumers of information, our primary concern is no longer the lack of its availability; rather, it is the indiscriminate overconsumption of it. Inaccurate, misleading, or outright false information run more rampant with each passing day. What I find most troubling is that day by day, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from what is true and what is not.Today’s p

Dear readers,Who are we? Why are we here? What is our purpose? Such are the fundamental questions that keep me awake at night from time to time. However, to claim that I would be the first of my kind to raise such questions could not be any more arrogant and myopic. Many great philosophers, like Descartes, Hume, and Nietzsche, have offered profound ontological insights surrounding the meaning, pur

Dear readers,to be frank, I am surprised at how quickly the semester, let alone this year, has gone by. Back in September, as the new Editor-in-Chief of The KAIST Herald, I promised to the readership to uphold a certain set of values within our newspaper. In my first Letter from the Chief, I pledged to commit myself to spreading the truth and fighting the power. Reflecting back on the semester so

Dear readers,For many college students, March marks the beginning of the spring semester, and along with it, fresh starts on multiple fronts. For the incoming freshmen, they are standing before more or less four years of college life ahead of them. The path lying ahead is teeming with endless possibilities; where the path will take them depends on the choices they make. The path is analogous to th

Dear readers,autumn. It announces its arrival by greeting us with the embrace of the howling breeze and the sight of falling leaves every morning. Out of all the other seasons in Korea, people seem to be particularly fond of autumn. As traditional Korean sayings go, autumn is the season of Cheongomabi — a prosperous time when skies are clear and the horses get fat. It is also the perfect sea

Dear readers, as musician Jimi Hendrix once said, “When the power of love overcomes the love for power, the world will know peace”. In light of recent events, our world as we know it seems to be heading in the completely opposite direction of peace. Those holding power have failed to wield it responsibly; instead they have allowed themselves to be tainted by their primal lust for power and desire

There I was, sitting at the end of the roundtable in The KAIST Herald newsroom, feeling the weight of all the eyes on me. How excruciating it was to realize that every word that left my mouth would determine my first impression on the people evaluating my potential as a Herald reporter. Never before in my life have I been more stressed over and attentive to each and every word. Yet, when asked the

Dear Readers,I am no fan of basketball, but once I came by a basketball joke:"Why is Pizza Hut better than LeBron James? They deliver."It is not pretty sight to come across people asking for extensions few hours before the deadline. Nor is it good news to hear from a third person that a colleague will be leaving soon. Still worse is the duty of having to criticize others?work that undoub

Dear Readers,This issue of The KAIST Herald will be my last as the editor-in-chief and as a KAIST student. The simultaneous letting go of my two main responsibilities for the past year and four years, respectively, has left me feeling disoriented. Albeit, with the coming exams and final term projects KAIST has so generously bombarded me with as a parting gift, it is hard to dwell on these troublin

Dear Readers, The end of the semester is finally within view, though for many including myself, the burden has yet to lessen and the worst yet to come. A tumultuous period indeed, during the last couple of weeks, the Undergraduate Student Council election had been under debate for numerous reasons (as outlined on page 1). Because most of the debating took place on online media forums, the strength